Shoe rack to car rack hack

Hot Wheels are the first choice of toy car in this house. They come in so many designs and survive being buried in the garden, sunk in the paddling pool and launched down the kids' Blutrack.

I started to look for some way of both storing them and displaying them. If you Google 'toy car storage', Pinterest throws up hundreds of ideas, both homemade and bought, for organizing them. I settled on the cheapest and easiest:

1. Buy a two-tier wooden slatted shoe rack. The slats need to be far enough apart and deep enough to store the cars. I used this one from Amazon.
2. Glue the two tiers to each other so that they make a wide enough 'road' for the cars. I used wood glue and weighed it down with tins of beans whilst it dried.
3. Add some picture hooks to the top for hanging.
4. Voila!

Where can I hang that?

Wardrobes: IKEA Pax 

Bespoke fitted wardrobes are pricey. The next best option is to design and build your own. With different colours, depths, heights, and an endless array of internal storage items, IKEA Pax wardrobes are the bees knees.

The best feature is that if your bedroom space is a bit tight, you can combine both hanging and folding space. By using drawers inside the wardrobe you don't have to find space in your room for a separate chest of drawers.You can also store small items such as jewellery and cuff links in pull-out trays with soft inserts.

The Pax online planner is time consuming but excellent. In 3D or 2D mode, it allows you to design your perfect wardrobe inside and out. You can spend hours dragging and dropping different combinations of shelves, rails and cupboards into the frame that best fits your space. Once happy, you can then with one click add all the necessary product items (of which there will be many) to your shopping basket.


If you still can't find a wardrobe to fit your space or you want to re-purpose the space a wardrobe provides, check out IKEA Hackers which has lots of ideas.

Our wardrobe

We each wanted our own wardrobes so we used the planner and kitted out two spaces of 100cm each.
We used Lansa handles, Vinterbro textured doors, Komplement drawers, shelves and organisers. We put soft Skubb storage cases on the top.

Top tips

• Make sure you have enough height clearance to assemble them. They come in two different heights (201cm and 236cm). There needs to be 10cm clearance between the top of the wardrobe and your ceiling.
• Think about whether hinged or sliding doors would be better. Sliding is probably better if you don't have much room. 
• Try combining different sizes of frames. For example if you want a 100cm wardrobe you can have 2 x 50cm frames or 1 x 100cm. 
• Trying to fill a corner? Not a problem. You can buy a corner unit.  
• Internal and external lights are available.
• Try and fit in a Komplement Valet Hanger on the side - it's really useful for hanging up clothes.
• Remember and fix them to the wall for peace of mind.

Uh oh moment

You can't put drawer next to a hinge as there's not enough space. We used one of the soft storage boxes instead.
I'd really like a full length mirror on the inside but as far as I know, IKEA don't sell on.

Did you know?

With over 12,000 products sold across over 300 stores around the world, IKEA products are all assigned names from a database of Swedish words.

• Bathroom products - Swedish lakes
• Bedroom textiles - flowers and plants
• Beds and wardrobes - place names
• Rugs - Danish place names
• Children's products - animals and adjectives
   

If you're interested in finding out more, check out the unofficial IKEA dictionary.